The traditional method of drying hair or clothes, involved drying in open-air. The time taken by the traditional method to completely dry the hair or clothes depends on several factors, such as temperature, humidity level, environmental factors such as wind effect or sun shine, characteristics of the hair including curliness, thickness, length, amount and volume of hair, and characteristics of the clothes such as thickness and materials of fabric. The traditional method involves temperature-dependent evaporation of water molecules from a surface of the hair or clothes. The evaporation rate depends on a vapor pressure of water for a given temperature, humidity level, or various above-mentioned environmental parameters. Thus, depending on the temperature, pressure, humidity level, and the available surface area and morphology of a wet object, the vapor pressure of water may vary and thus affect the evaporative drying process. Therefore, the drying process may require a significant amount of time.
The above-mentioned problem of the traditional method is solved by modern dryers. The dryers use a mechanism for heating the hair to a high temperature (higher than natural, ambient, or room temperature) to accelerate the water evaporation. The dryers typically include a blower with a heating element that generates hot air with a sufficiently high temperature to evaporate water. When the hot air comes in contact with the surface of the hair, the sufficiently high temperature of the air evaporates the water molecules, thereby drying the hair.
While the dryers reduce the time taken in drying the hair, they cause various undesirable effects, including damage to the hair. The hair is essentially composed of proteins and as proteins contain water, the removal of water molecules from the surface of the hair inevitably and irreversibly removes water molecules from the protein structure as well. Alternatively stated, while using the dryers, hair may be burned and the protein in the hair can be irreversibly damaged when exposed to the high temperature air. For wet hair, water molecules inside bundles of hair hold the individual strands of hair via water tension. For example, if the wet hair agglomerates into several bundles of hair, blow-drying with a dryer will usually evaporate the outer water molecules on the bundled hair before reaching the inner water molecules that reside inside the bundled hair. Removing inner water molecules inside the wet bundled hair can over expose the outer hair or individual hair strands that have been completely dried, to the high temperature air, and the already-dried hair may then get irreversibly damaged due to the high temperature air.
Moreover, the dryers consume high amount of power due to high power-drawn by the heating element. Typically, the dryers consume about two kilowatts of energy to operate. Therefore, given their large-scale use and frequency of use (on average at least 4-5 times per week per person), the dryers consume a substantial amount of energy. Further, surface area for drying is limited by the construction of the blowers. To increase the surface area for drying, sizes of the blowers have to be increased, which in turn increases the power consumption of the dryers. High power consumption and high temperature operation inadvertently limit the use of the dryers to plug-in operations (i.e., connected to an electrical outlet to draw power), thus reducing the portability of the dryers. At the same time, extreme care needs to be taken while using or operating the dryers with potentially hot surfaces that can burn when inappropriately held. Hence, the dryers are not safe for use for children, elderly people, and the like.
In light of the foregoing, there exists a need for a significantly improved dryer for drying hair or clothes. Also, there exists a need for a dryer that solves the above-mentioned problems and provides an improved and efficient drying mechanism for drying the hair or clothes. Finally, it is desirable that the dryer is more portable as compared to the modern dryers.